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GNOME Developer Adds Tablet Support To Wayland's Libinput

04-21-2014, 01:50 PM

Phoronix: GNOME Developer Adds Tablet Support To Wayland's Libinput

The libinput library that's a generic means of handling Linux input devices so the support can be standardized and shared amongst other Wayland compositors and other possible "clients", now has patches for tablet support...

This is great news. I can only hope that this means some day Wayland and Libinput will clear up all, or at least most, of the issues that have been plaguing graphics tablet users on Linux for ages now. The evdev drivers mostly work quite well now, but the way Xorg and all the different toolkits handle tablet input each in their own way leaves a lot to be desired. I'm hoping that by the time Wayland is ready for prime time I will finally be able to easily bind my tablet to a single screen and not have to worry about each software package interpretting the coordinates differently than Xorg the way it often happens now.

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So libinput is also what will enable my Synaptic Touchpad to work as it is now? I can use it out of the box on Linux, but only with xf86-input-synaptics the acceleration feels right and I can get my two-finger scrolling etc.

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I'm insanely happy about this. I sure hope KDE is using Libinput just so they can leverage this. I really can't wait to use Wayland with Krita and MyPaint and just have an overall smooth experience for painting in.

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I hope libinput fixes the random glitches I got with KDE (or is it because of X11?), in some rare cases I got mouse right-click menu popup glitches, or, quite more often, the sound menu (which shows up when clicking the lower right desktop sound icon) refuses to hide after clicking outside it, which reminds me that it's probably because KDE is running on top of old crap called X11.

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Are there any Gnome based tablets anyway? Or can you install a Gnome based distro on any tablet and have full functionality?

I got confused at first too. This is about Wacom(-type) tablets rather than the ipad-type devices that are nowadays called tablets. No clue how good a touch experience is with GNOME but I'm pretty sure it's there in Wayland due to Jolla et al.